Ancestors

In 2019, indeed, the Vatican found it necessary to issue specific guidance about gender, entitled ‘Male and Female He Created Them’. The paper embraces a strict binary – no exceptions – and ascribes different aptitudes to each sex as well as different roles in society, appropriate to each gender. ‘Women have a unique understanding of reality,’ we a

Behind the iron-rimmed wheels, they found a rectangular stain of darker soil – all that was left of the wooden or wicker carriage of the chariot. And within the carriage, the skeletal remains of the driver, his body tucked into a crouched position to fit him in. In front of the chariot, the archaeologists began to uncover even more bones. Not human

The Amesbury Archer lived in a time when metal was brand new in northwest Europe. His copper knives and gold ornaments are the earliest known pieces of metal in Britain.

The classical writers tell us that Iron Age society was arranged in a hierarchy that bears a striking resemblance to the ideal in Greek and Roman society: peasants at the bottom; artisans, bards and druids in the middle; then nobles; and a single chieftain at the lofty apex of a triangular or pyramidal structure. Women could only gain access to the

But a recent, wide-ranging and in-depth (I know – impressive!) analysis of Iron Age burial practices across Britain has challenged lots of the assumptions that have become embedded in archaeology – particularly the idea of consistent rites within certain regions, but even the idea of a background of consistent ‘invisible rites’ right across the cou

Jugs with handles are one popular form that appears first in the Hungarian Neolithic and continues into Bell Beaker sites around 2700 BCE, then spreading south and west, reaching France by 2300 BCE. Another type of pot that follows a similar trajectory is the ‘polypod cup’ – more of a bowl, really – with poly pods: many feet. Pots with a line of ho

Those must have been extraordinary funerals. Perhaps the chariots were used as hearses to convey the bodies to the graves in each case. In each of the women’s burials, the chariots were dismantled and laid, in pieces, in the base of the pit, before the body was lowered in – each with a mirror – symbolising power or prophesy, or perhaps both.

The iron mirror is a curious artefact, in the Lady’s Barrow. It’s easy to leap to conclusions about this too, and to see it as simply a personal object – mirrors are so easy to come by today. But Iron Age mirrors are quite rare, and the workmanship that would have gone into making it – polishing and polishing it until it offers back a true reflecti

it was not Pleistocene ice but Neolithic humans that moved the stones – more than 250 kilometres, from Pembrokeshire to Salisbury Plain. The clincher for this hypothesis is the astonishing recent discovery by Professor Mike Parker Pearson and his team of the traces of what was once a stone circle at Waun Mawn in the Preseli Hills. It appears to be